In Europe, the arrival of the farmers who replaced Mesolithic hunter-gatherers happened in force 9,000 years ago but it was happening elsewhere prior to that. In Syria, there is even evidence of scientific trait selection in grains in 10,000 B.C. but in other parts of the world agriculture came much later.  

A region in sub-tropical China which did not have agriculture until the arrival of domesticated rice from elsewhere may have gotten agriculture prior to that - as far back as 3,000 B.C., according to a new paper.

Because energy resources in the body must be optimized as much as possible, a new paper says, tasks inherently related to survival, like immune function, take priority. Any leftover energy is then dedicated to reproduction.

 By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, researchers have been able to create delicate flower structures -  not at the scale of inches, but microns.

These minuscule sculptures don't resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that's what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.

Do you see music the same way as your neighbor? Apparently so.  U.C. Berkeley psychologists say people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors, suggesting that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers. They suggest that
our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel 

My wife’s cousin, the break-dancing radiologist, broke the microphone clip off my mic stand while singing karaoke on Thanksgiving (my wife and I host Thanksgiving at our house for the family every year). I had another microphone clip and replaced it so we could continue with karaoke, but I decided to keep the broken pieces of the old clip for the junk drawer.

Uranus and Neptune have a lot in common, climate-wise, even though Uranus is tipped on its side with the pole facing the sun during winter.  They are both home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, they have hurricane-like storms as big as our whole planet and immense weather systems can last for years. 

But what about their origins? Do the atmospheric patterns arise from deep down in the planet, or are they confined to shallower processes nearer the surface?  Understanding the atmospheric circulation is not simple for a planet without a solid surface, where Earth-style boundaries between solid, liquid and gas layers do not exist.

Terror networks are comparable in their structure to hierarchical organization in companies and certain online social networks, say the authors of a paper outlining how
a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, like a terrorist organization, can work, using minimal resources. 

In those hierarchical social networks, information flows in one direction from a source, which produces the information or data, downwards to sinks, which consume it. 

A group contends that the journal impact factor (JIF), which ranks scholarly journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, has increasingly become an obsession in science. Impact factor of articles is used in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness. 

Hofstadter's Butterfly, a complex pattern of the energy states of electrons that resembles a butterfly, has appeared in physics textbooks as a theoretical concept of quantum mechanics for nearly 40 years but had never been directly observed - until now.